Ad exec and terminal lung-cancer patient blogs about the inevitable

By Russ Britt

This isn’t the usual stuff we blog about in “Health Exchange,” but we’re making an exception here….

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Mike Hughes

We’ve found another blog, courtesy of Business Insider, authored by advertising executive Mike Hughes. President of the Martin Agency that is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies
/quotes/zigman/230324/quotes/nls/ipgIPG, Hughes is a lung-cancer patient who first was diagnosed nearly two decades ago of his illness — and told four months ago that he had two weeks to live. He’s still alive, and his wife, Ginny, also is a cancer patient, though she was just told she’s in remission.

Hughes has been jotting down his thoughts in a diary-like blog called “Unfinished Thinking” that is both touching and illuminating about the inevitable. You can check it out for yourself, but here are some passages from late last month that are hard to forget:

“I don’t usually feel sorry for myself. I think that’s because I have an active imagination that doesn’t often focus on the cancer. To me the cancer is boring. The pills, the treatments, the routines, the scans, the numbers — I can’t concentrate on them any more than I can concentrate on the details of a legal contract or an insurance form. To me this is uninteresting stuff that’s best left to the technicians,” Hughes writes.

“Dying, on the other hand, is endlessly interesting. Partly because it’s scary and mysterious, of course, but it’s more than that. If nothing else, we are the heroes of our own lives, and we want our lives to have meaning. We want to know how the story turns out. De Gaulle is credited with saying that the cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men. There’s supposed to be irony in that thought, but I don’t think there should be. Men and women — you and I — are literally irreplaceable. Future generations may succeed us, but they won’t leave the same footprints. If Shakespeare had died young, would someone else have written ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Lear’? Would the world be different today if there had been no Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin?”

He goes on to say: ”Most of our personal contributions to the world are played out on much smaller stages, but if we can imagine that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil can give birth to a tornado in Texas, who knows what differences we make when we raise our voices, wave our arms and make our impact. For most of us, a tally of our arm-waving will be taken at our death.”

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Health Exchange guides investors to the crucial market intelligence they need to keep up with the health care industry, which makes up one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Anchored by Russ Britt, Health Exchange is the essential site for those looking for the most important news, data and analysis on the sector. You can reach Russ at Rbritt@marketwatch.com.